Mockingjay (Hunger Games, #3)
author: Suzanne Collins
name: Paul
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2010
rating: 2
read at: 2011/08/09
date added: 2011/08/10
shelves: novel, science-fiction, young-adult
review:
For the first few hours after I finished Mockingjay, the final chapter in the Hunger Games trilogy, I thought I just hated the ending. But as I reflect more on it, I think the entire book was disappointing, even leading up to the final 50 or so pages.
I won’t spoil the end, but here’s the problem I have with it: Up through the finale of Catching Fire (as stunted as it was), even though we see all the events through Katniss’s eyes, her own negative self-image is not what is reflected back from the supporting cast. Throughout the first two installments even when she loathes herself and struggles with her own actions, we see what others see in her, the good they find, the inspiration she ignites. There is a great scene in Catching Fire where Peeta teases Katniss because she can’t see the purity in herself that others do (and occasionally find resentful). In that moment we understand what Peeta is talking about, even when she can’t. Katniss is a survivor and she does what she has to to protect her family, her loved ones, even herself. But she’s motivated by more than just cold self-preservation, she also wants to do the right thing and her actions—even murderous ones—are never beyond the reader’s ability to sympathize.
Where Mockingjay breaks down is that it transforms Katniss from desperate survivor, justifiable murderess, into a stone sociopath. The key is that at some early point in the third book, I stopped rooting for her. She spends an excessive amount of time in the book convalescing which destroys the frantic pacing that made The Hunger Games and Catching Fire so ridiculously readable, and while Suzanne Collins makes an effort to repeat a situation similar to the arena for a third time, it fails. I was able to forgive the Quarter Quell for being a contrivance because it had internal consistency and a suitable lead-in but with Mockingjay the motivations are all wrong and the stakes are too far removed, creating a forced atmosphere. The rest of the story involves the war against the Capitol, but it’s not a war novel—it maybe should have been.
Broadly speaking you can see that sense of Collins reaching desperately to write herself out of a corner throughout the novel. Characters change drastically because they need to in order to maintain a rough similarity to the structures established in books one and two (the love triangle, the conflicted protagonist, the life-or-death stakes) but that need exists only in the author’s head. And even with all that effort, it’s still wildly divergent from the previous entries. The result is a book that tries to split the difference between maintaining what the reader has come to expect from the series and needing to be broader in scope to best serve the story. The tepid middle ground results in a muddled, unfocused plot leading to the unsatisfying conclusion.
It’s bad enough that the ending results in a main character that is nearly impossible to care about, what’s worse is the fact that it feels like an alternate ending from the special features on a DVD: The “dark” take that is interesting in a curious sense but didn’t play well with test audiences. You’re intrigued by what it could say about the characters, but it doesn’t fit well with what we’ve learned about them so far, leaving you relieved that they stuck with the better, lighter conclusion. Except here, this is the only ending we’ve got. And there are so many things wrong with it (again, no specific spoilers, just generalizations): Katniss’s breaking point could have been handled in a dozen different ways but Collins goes for the jugular and as a result undoes everything that matters not just to Katniss, but the reader as well. She never explains Katniss’ actions sufficiently, never contextualizes them so we can get a sense of whether she was justified or maybe will be in the future, never even attempts to make sense of it. And perhaps worst of all, the resolution of the love triangle that has been such a pivotal part of the story until the final pages and epilogue is whipped by in a blur as if it were an afterthought, a non-issue. It’s so incredibly flippant that it made me irritated that I had even cared which suitor she would choose to begin with.
Obviously I have affection for the books, the characters and the series as a whole. If not, I wouldn’t care the way I do about how it ended. But it reminded me of two other trilogies: One is The Matrix movies, where my low opinion of how the story drew to a close affected my overall perception of the earlier movies that I liked so much. The other is Scott Westerfeld‘s Uglies trilogy (since expanded), which did the opposite by letting the books change the world without trying to return to the hook from book one, allowing the story to happen naturally. I don’t have a problem with Collins choosing to go a darker route with her finale than Westerfeld did (though his isn’t exactly a comedy either), but there’s dark and then there’s dismal. Even worse, it feels rushed and incomplete while being dismal.
What I feel is the most frustrating part is that I don’t even feel that a similar outline of this book, expanded differently, would have been as disappointing: Even if the same key events took place with minor revisions it could have been done in a satisfying way. Instead this feels too much like an early draft, one an editor needed to draw big red lines through and say, “Less moping, less grim-for-grim’s-sake, more intrigue, more vitality.” I still recommend the series, and I’m probably more generous with this entry than I should be on the strength of the first two, but I can’t help but warn others that this isn’t the conclusion I wanted from a series that I loved for 700 pages and then resented for about the last 200.